On Tuesday, December 1st Grantbook’s Salesforce experts, Tierney Smith and Rahi Delvi, dove deep into effective Salesforce strategies, tips and tricks. Salesforce is an incredibly powerful tool that can help grantmakers, foundations and impact investors achieve their mission, but it can also be confusing and challenging to optimize, especially for organizations with few staff and resources dedicated to technology.

This is why we’ve put together the top five things you need to know about using Salesforce for your grantmaking process.

Top 5 Takeaways:

1. You can track outgoing grants, pending grant applications, and approved grants with Salesforce. This includes tracking reporting between organization members throughout the entire process.

2. Salesforce allows you to automate workflows to increase productivity and decrease  the time spent on your grantmaking. For example, once a workflow is triggered, an e-mail alert can be automatically sent to a grantee to remind them that a progress report is due.

3. You can integrate Salesforce with other technology tools that you may already be using. Your expert tools (ex. Formstack, Eventbrite and MailChimp) can do what they do best, while being able to talk directly to Salesforce to keep your information all in one place.

4. Substituting Salesforce data imports for manual data entry can be intimidating at first, but after a bit of training and practice, you will save yourself hours of time. Trust us. It’s worth it.

5. Salesforce offers 10 free licenses for charities. This has been a very affordable system for foundations and non-profit organizations.

Want more information on how you can integrate Salesforce and other technologies into your organization? We can help. Let's talk!